It isn’t easy coming up with story ideas and tips everyday; and it doesn’t help if you have a short-tempered editor like me calling down fire and brimstone when you come up short.
Why not use a mind map?
Mind mapping is basically a skill that uses diagrams to represent words, ideas, tasks, or other items linked to and arranged around a central key issue.
Blogger Ernesto Aguilar suggests that you start with an issue not related to your job like happiness.
- Draw a circle and draw spokes from it. Put happiness in the middle of your circle. Now go around the circle, without thinking, and place associations with each spoke. Have a friend or colleague or two do the same thing.
- Now look at what you have in terms of happiness. Do you and your friends or colleagues have written down one, two, three words others share? Go through and see what words get at least half. Note that everyone is an individual, and the chances of finding half the group with consensus on a word are slim. This will give you a new way of thinking of something. You can even take this a step further by creating spokes on each word/spoke.
Find out how he relates mind mapping to community radio by visiting his blog post here.